ICANN will discuss this week whether to allow non-Latin domain names

 This week the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is holding a meeting in Seoul where the participants will be discussing one of the biggest changes of the Internet in its 40 years history. ICANN is expected to approve international domain names that can be written in languages other than English.

At the focus of the meeting is to discuss whether ICANN should allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in characters not based on Latin letters. According to some people the move could open the Internet for more users across the globe as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic.

"This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature." He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference's final day.

According to Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's new president and CEO, id the changes are approved ICANN will start accepting applications for non-English domain names with the first entries into the system expected to appear in about mid 2010.

Thrush said that the change will include the creation of a translation system that allows multiple scripts to be converted to the right address.

"We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years," he said. "And so we're really ready to start rolling it out."